Psychoanalysis outside the clinic

More than a hundred years after the founding of psychoanalysis, it remains influential and controversial far outside its core sphere of activity in the ‘clinic’. In a wide range of cultural and social disciplines, psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to explain human subjectivity and its relations with the social world. The book on which this talk is based explores these interventions of psychoanalysis through detailed examination of how they work in literature, politics, social psychology, philosophy and psychosocial studies. It shows how psychoanalysis can at times greatly illuminate these fields of study, and how at other times it might mis-read them. In this talk, I lay out some questions about how psychoanalysis comes to be ‘applied’, attending especially to the issue of the generality or otherwise of interpretations and transference